Posts Tagged ‘photoshop’

In this tutorial of mine, you will learn how to convert or change a normal colored and contrasted photo to a high contrast. You can basically use any type of image or photo for this tutorial: landscapes, portraits, sport captures, etc. Almost any photo is suitable to practice on. Also don’t be afraid to try black and white, colored, or monotoned photos. Each will produce a unique and different effect on your photo.

What you might not know is that this technique is used in art photography, advertisements, editorial photography, and any other photography that you can think of. Amazingly, many professional photo editors will be using the same program you do: Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop is a digital image editing program that can be used on both PCs and Macs. If you do not already have a version of Photoshop downloaded on your computer, you can buy the program at www.adobe.com (although the price is steep) and even try out the Adobe Photoshop CS6 extended beta (the newest Photoshop version). The try out is free and lasts 30 days, but make sure you have sufficient space on your hard drive for the program.

Now to start the tutorial, you will need to open up a picture on a new canvas. Remember you can use any type of image. If you want to make it black and white before you begin editing the photo, go to Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate.

Next, duplicate the layer by pressing CRTL+J (as the hotkey) or by going to Layer -> Duplicate Layer.

Then, open channel mixer (Image -> Adjustment -> Channel Mixer) and apply these values (if you made your image black and white first, you can skip this step completely and move on to the next):

Output Channel: Grey. Red: +100%. Green: 0%. Blue: 48%.

Now, press CTRL+U or go to Image -> Adjustment -> Hue/Saturation to open Hue and Saturation dialog and selector menu and give these specific values:

Hue: 100

Saturation: 100

Lightness: 0

The image after this step should be a neon green color.

Finally, duplicate the base layer and move it to top of the layer palette. Change its blending mode to Linear Light. If you want to, you can again duplicate the top layer.

That’s it. Then you are done and you should have a funky, new, high contrast photo that can be used for anything. Make sure that if you’re going to print it out, it is 300 or higher DPI.